the missing ladder......................

      Unlike earlier newcomers, today's immigrants find it difficult, in rapidly deindustrializing economies with slow growth, to secure the kind of work that might provide a ladder to the middle class.  Mass migration has not created the vibrant multicultural future expected by some, but instead has created much of the poverty and social disorder that characterized large European cities in the nineteenth century. 

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class